I’ve always understood the Jewish timeline as being the approximate duration of Human civilization. For the indeterminate between the formation of the world and the Rise of Civilization, a lot of stuff happened that Humans Just Don’t Care About Because There Weren’t Any Humans Around Yet ™.
I hate to bring up a factual question in GD, but: What’s the current best estimate for when civilization started?
As for the time zone question, it’s the Jewish point of view (at least the traditional / mystic view) that history happens on the Jewish calendar. So the creation would have happened at 9 AM in the Jerusalem time zone. (Self-nitpick: Jerusalem was a highland farming community during the Biblical age, so the time zone would be better describes as Jaffa Standard Time. ISTR that Jaffa was the city where Andromeda, of the Medusa & Perseus legend, was princess. Meaning that the city is incredibly ancient.)
Well, it’s always open to (sometimes fierce) debate, but the dates we tend to run with, currently, are:
Mesopotamia - 4000 BCE
Nile Valley - 3000 BCE
Indus Valley - 2500 BCE
Yangtze Valley - 3000 - 2000 BCE (With a leap and shift of growth to the north shortly thereafter)
MesoAmerica - 1500 BCE (with Andean following by a bit)
Western Africa - 500 CE
Not only do we not necessarily agree on the dates, we do not always agree on the definitions. (For example, many older discussions of civilizations tended to ignore several Northern but sub-Sahara groups. (Racism! one cries.) However, the Norse are equally ignored in “classical” definitions of civilization, despite their having established most of the objective marks of classical definitions.)
Thats easy, and has already been done by calculating the mineral and other deposit runoffs that go into the ocean and the amount of minerals in the oceans today.
Nearly every measure of deposits and their rate of runoff in the ocean come out to between 5000 and 10000 years.
Minerals in the ocean tend to settle on the ocean floor, eventually. The minerals in the ocean floor are then subjected to the process of subduction, where the that section of ocean floor is forced back into the earth as tectonic plates shift back and forth across the earth.
This presents one of the more famous cases of Creationist dishonesty, in which one of the Young Earth spokesmen took the levels of deposit and matched them against the levels of proposed subduction and claimed that the numbers showed a young earth. Unfortunately, he cited different numbers for different operations, failing to note that he was changing the terms of the debate. Using real rates of deposit and subduction, we do not come up with numbers anywhere near “5000 and 10000 years.”
The YEC author was Humphreys in his Evidence for a Young World.
Humphreys took information from V.V. Gordeyev showing the rate of sedimentary accumulation and information from W.W. Hay for a rate of subduction. When one looks at the corrected numbers for either rate, they indicate a slow, continuous subduction that removes minerals, leaving the current amount in the ocean–not predicated on a Young earth.
The idea that the Earth was created 6000 odd years ago with all the fossils and varves in place is an old one, expounded by P H Gosse in his essay Omphalos in the 19th C…
of course, Gosse was right, except he got the date wrong- the world was actually created last thursday…
Did anybody ever hear about Philip K. Dick writing that book (“Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said”) really fast, as if he felt he was channelling or something, and then some time later events began to unfold in his life just the way they happened in his book?
Then PKD started to get the idea that maybe we were all stuck in some sort of contrived reality created by Satan, bewildered by our senses to think we were in year such-and-such when we were actually stuck in some moment in time?
If that’s true, then maybe the earth is only a second old, and Satan and God (maybe Loki, too, a la “Job: A Comedy…” good call bluesky) are battling for possesion of the earth right now. So you’re all wrong!!
And I think that the term ‘religious science’ doesn’t mean what some people think it means. It means (to me) that we search for the answers in as logical a fashion as out minds can fathom, understanding all the time that there are things beyond our reckoning, and this can give a scientist spiritual fulfillment.